Low-cost 3D printers and crowdfunding suicide
3dprototypesandmodels.com.au
3dprototypesandmodels.com.au
That said, the 3D printer "market", if you will, is remarkable. It is being created in exactly the same way that the microcomputer market was created, and from that we can potentially predict its path and some opportunities there.
For those of you too young to remember, IBM was not a participant in the microcomputer market, which was called microcomputers (as opposed to minicomputers from the likes of DEC or Data General). Between 1972 (introduction of the 8008 microprocessor from Intel) and 1981 (introduction of the IBM PC from IBM), the market consisted of lots of documentation (datasheets) from manufacturers, re-using 100 pin edge connectors for wiring busses, and lots of source code published in "magazines" which were no more than photocopied pages stapled together. And then, as with 3D printers today, the nerdiest of the nerds all had to have one but they didn't know why, and the rest of the world felt that owning your own computer was a ridiculous idea. Why pay all that money so that you could play 'hunt the wumpus' in a painfully slow loading stripped down version of the BASIC programming language?
Stepping back though, the excitement, the nerd fests, the people going nuts over these things, like a spinning top in a maze randomly bouncing off the walls, eventually found a solution, or a use, for this technology that non-nerds could relate too. Initially that was spreadsheets, then small databases, and data collection and analysis that the 'big' computers had been doing since the start. There is a lot of capital trying to figure out which company is the next Microsoft.
When I was at Google, a relative of one of the Makerbot founders worked at Google as well, and sought out volunteers to help build their first 'Cupcake' printer kit and give feedback. It was an amazing little box which, when the stars and planets aligned, would actually print reliably for the 3 hours or so needed to make a print of any decent size. It was a marvel, and sometimes it worked reliably.
I ended up buying a Makerbot Replicator 1 at a weak moment at Makerfair when they were 15% off list (they were clearing out old stock to make room for the Replicator 2) I printed a few test prints and then it sat on the shelf for nearly two years. I recently fired it up again because my daughter wanted me to print her a measuring spoon for chai.
Diving back into it I realized that there are a lot of people "building" 3D printers but not nearly so many "engineering" 3D printers. Circuit design for example on the RAMPS 1.4 board has little to no self protection circuitry and so it is prone to being damaged by things like moving the steppers when the power isn't applied. Extruders of all types with varying levels of material feed, feedback, and consistency. Machines that require amazing amounts of calibration to print correctly assembled with fasteners without any locking capability at all. It is so much like early S-100 microcomputers it is practically a deja-vu experience.
3D printing is a 'thing', and its going to be a huge thing. While I get that there may not be anything today you want to print, I can also imagine a day where all your currently disposable plastic goods (cups, utensils, clips, etc) would be printed on demand and disposed in a hopper that would recycle them as raw material for the next round. Because of the amount of investment going on, I don't worry about novices who go bankrupt trying to build a printer after a successful crowd funding campaign. I feel feel badly for them sure, but I don't think it will derail this particular technology bloom.
Is this the killer app for home 3D printing? Printing plastic spoons? The same spoons you can buy mass-produced in packs of fifty for eighty cents or something?
Not exactly repair, more adapting to change.
This is also a fabulous use of tech and a wonderful story.
The real money will be made, just like with minicomputers, in the software. Desktop publishing had themes, future software will make it easy to make stuff that looks like, lego or erector set or trees or whatever. High detail procedurally generated themes to surface whatever objects people are producing.
Step past thinking that it is a spoon that you can buy a pack of 50 for (which you have to in order to keep the costs down) to thinking that in the space where you would store a pack of 50 spoons, knives, forks, plates, and napkins you can have an nearly inexhaustible supply of spoons with a birthday theme, serving, color matched to a table setting. Every time you set the table you can print it all out, from place mats to drink cups. And then throw it back to be recycled again with just the organics left over.
And to return to my previous theme, having been the first person in my family to build their own computer in 1978 and listened to everyone about how stupid and inane it was to own a useless computer, only to live my life and find them become the 'smartphones' of today. When I walked through Makerfair this year and saw all of the 3D printing stuff there and heard the same sort of dimissive comments which I had heard at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1980, it really struck me. The same feeling you get when you are halfway through a book and realize you've read the same story but set with different characters and in a different place, but fundamentally the same story.
Its going to be interesting.
The cool thing about this, especially if you can recycle, is that you can say "Well, I don't need x, y, and z -- I'll just toss them in the melter" the same way someone says "man, I have a lot of plastic spoons and old hangers, I'll toss them in the trash."
But then you can turn around and say "Oh yeah, the doohickey on my closet door is broken, I'll just print another one."
I'd say the most relevant word there is "plastic". I don't want replacements for my cheap plastic objects. I'd love to "print" with other materials.
The killer app for 3D printers would be to supply whatever it is you want whenever you want it - even if you live in Arrowtown NZ (lucky me!).
I see a massive battle coming between Amazon's logistics on one hand, and the effectiveness of 3D printers on the other. 3D printers' limitations (plastic-only, no colour, slow) mean Amazon is safe for now, but once I can print my measuring spoons faster and cheaper than Amazon can ship them, that's a killer app.
So, Walmart is the only world provider of 80c plastic spoons ?
Let´s be serious, unless you live in the middle of a jungle or a desert (in which case you´ll probably value more a reusable metal spoon over a 3D-printed one), you´ll rarely be less that 30min drive from a supermarket or convenience store (to which you´ll need to go anyway to buy some definitely non-3d-printable-yet food) that will probably have what you are looking for.
Even if your reasoning is sound, I believe your situation it's kind of an exception, most people live "next to Walmart", so it´s hard to think about it as a killer application.
In the medium term I can see "high-tech hippie" communes of young educated hipsters moving to the outskirts of cities, living in plastic domes, telecommuting, composting their waste and 3D printing parts for their maker-culture activities. If this catches on, this could be the basis for less dense cities.
If I could recycle old plastic waste to print interesting spirograph stencils, I would be very very happy.
Sunday afternoon: I am tidying up the house. I could use six or so small boxes to store neatly some loose parts. I would have printed those boxes if I had a 3D printer.
Sunday afternoon: I need to print my flight ticket. I could wait tomorrow morning, go in a copy shop and print it. 4 cents. I will print it right now with my inkjet printer and forget about it.
My nephews are visiting me and one of them likes my keychain. I would print a copy for him if I had a 3D printer.
My nephews are visiting me and one of them likes one of my photos that hang in the dining room. I could wait until tomorrow, go to the photo shop and print one for him. 1 euro. I will print it right now with my inkjet printer and git it to him right away.
I think "I can print it right away" is a killer app on its own.
To make matters worse increased competition has pushed ks' staff to relax their already very relaxed rules, again a sign that their point is to make more from campaign fees.
The problem is that by doing this they are destroying not only their brand but the concept of crowdfunding itself which will affect creators who will no longer be able to access this alternative funding, and users who will miss on the innovations that can only be created through this system because traditional investors are not interested.
The only ones getting out unscratched have to be the con artists who get to walk out with tens of thousands of dollars, and sometimes more. For them it will only be a matter of moving on to their next scam.
And IMHO, it's far too early to know whether 3D printing is the new computer or the new VR (well VR may change soon but for now it's nearly nothing).
There was always a guy wanting to sell his stock prediction software -- probably written in 1000 lines of BASIC -- for $500, another one who would mail you printouts of your own biorhythms (remember those?) made from your birth date by a REAL COMPUTER, so guaranteed to be accurate. There were teenagers rediscovering shell sort by themselves, and writing rambling, disconnected but nevertheless admirable articles about it.
As you said, 3D printers are a nerd thing. Nobody in their right mind would spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to build a machine that can take hours to print a plastic spoon that you could buy for pocket change at a dollar store. It makes no sense. Yet all those people who would have soldered a Cosmac ELF in their garage in 1976 are now using their 3D printer to print gears for their next 3D printer.
The garden-shack hacker spirit of the "those magnificent men in their flying machines" variety (to be distinguished from academic hacking documented in Stephen Levy's _Hackers_) has moved on from CB radio, to computers, and now to what's called the Maker movement. And the big wheel keeps on turning.
Besides Makerbot, who has the advantages of 5 years of experience and VC money, none of the low end FDM printers have any sort of moat to make new customers want their printer over the newest kickstarter project. And Makerbot isn't even competing on price anymore.
Without some major innovation in ease of use, print resolution, print time, print material, or reliability, I don't see how a startup FDM printer can raise the kind of money outlined in the article.
There is also some genuine innovation happening, even if it is only on the very edges of the space. Things like auto bed leveling, dual extruders, different print bed materials and features, etc.
> On top of that, ask any hobbyist who owns one how often they use it after the initial wow factor wears off. Most people run out of stuff to print pretty quickly.
I definitely agree with this, but I'm not convinced it's that big of a problem. I bought a Printrbot Simple already assembled, used it fairly constantly for a couple of weeks, then my usage definitely tapered off. But I'm not too upset about that. Whenever I want to print something, or a friend wants to be introduced to 3D printing, I have one readily available.
It goes against the whole idea of open source hardware, but making the fruits of your R&D labors available for anyone to copy also ensures that even if you are innovating, you don't have much of a window to differentiate yourself within before your competitors catch up.
I don't really have any useful modeling skills, so I'd be reliant on 3d models I could find elsewhere. So I go to http://www.thingiverse.com/ and to be honest, even at the price of free, I can't find a single thing I'd ever be interested in having sitting around my house. Almost every object available is a novelty statue made by a fan of some geek favorite property, or some incredibly specific part for things I don't own.
I mean, do I really need to invest a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars and hundreds of hours of my time to print off a low quality t-slot hinge when I could just stop off at my local home deport and pick up a high quality metal hinge for $2.95?
In almost every case where I think it'd be cool to have a printer sitting around in the off chance I really needed to spend $3 in ABS plastic and spend a half hour assembling a lens cap, I can usually find an actual version of the part cheaper and higher quality on-line somewhere and I don't have to muck around with anything.
I'm obviously the wrong kind of audience for 3d printers as they are now. But I don't think I'm that atypical of the general audience that's out there. The economics and ROI on 3d printers don't remotely work out for anybody who's not a tinkerer. Until I can start printing off exact-to-quality copies of my favorite shoes for 1/3rd the store price, or entire working keyboards I don't have to assemble and find electronics. I just don't see much of a general market.
But if you buy a tool because you've been sold on all of the cool things you _could_ do with the tool, and you weren't necessarily looking to do any of those things before you knew about the tool, then buyer's remorse is almost certain to come your way.
99% of smartphone apps fall into this category. The internet of things, at least currently, is also an example of this. There tons of products out there that solve problems that no one actually has, but can be construed as game-changing with romantic notions and polished marketing.
Use case: you get a push notification when the dishwasher/washing machine/dryer/etc finished.
Thoughts?
If you find a 3D printing group, you will spend at most 5 hours to learn how to print something. Nowadays with automatic bed leveling is more like an hour or so.
But yeah, if you are not a tinkerer, then it is not for you.
But for those tinkering with the world, like architects, engineers, scientists... having a 3D printer is invaluable.
We build calibration systems for cameras and recognition that will cost us thousands of dollars each for basically nothing, thanks to 3d printers.
It is also amazing for sharing design work. We send a model over the Internet and someone in other country could understand how it works just printing in plastic, while the real piece will be aluminum, steel or carbon fiber.
I'm concerned about the hype that it gets though "download a car!" and the lack of understanding in the industry at the low end (among people who make 3d printers, investors and consumers) about what it is exactly that they do and how they work. There's a kind of weird hype that they're basically Star Trek replicators:
1) feed in plastic
2) download model from internet
3) print an entire household of goods for next to nothing
But with some very rare exceptions, usually in the very expensive SLS levels, final items aren't being produced and the quality, durability and complexity of what gets produced is not yet at what a normal consumer would expect.
Even among crap Chinese plastics junk I have all over my house, there's precious few items that a 3d printer can produce end-to-end -- even if I have to do some minor assembly. Nearly every item has some kind of metal spring or screw or lens or circuit board or something in it. There's no way for anybody right now to download a new remote control model and have it print off ready for batteries to go in.
The very large number of low-end 3d printer makers and the excited investors makes me think that people don't fundamentally understand these limitations yet.
The upside of this of course is that it's very hard for anti-piracy groups to make any kind of reasonable claim that 3d printing is going to put anybody out of business since a half hour looking into the technology reveals the limitations pretty quickly.
You bought an Apple, Spectrum, Amiga or Atari and it was basically a toy. Nothing compared with the real thing with 200 MB tape.
People got a job at IBM because it was "safe" while they joked about the capabilities of those toys.
And they were truly toys. My parents bought home those computers and my brothers and sisters used them basically for gaming, "wasting" time with them.
But suddenly along the way things change, and it become really useful to have a personal computer and it gave my brothers and sisters an edge over everybody else. And those toys started being smaller, cheaper and faster as they were manufactured in the millions.
The same people who got the job at IBM were fired as personal computers took the world by storm with Window95. And that was before tablets, before any grandpa could use a computer.
Some applications like 3D prosthetics are really life changing for lots of people, like people without legs,hands,or the blind, or just old people that will be able to print something that supports them walking instead of living on a chair (with all the associated health problems, we humans are not designed to live on a chair).
Most 3D printers makers use Metric3mm,or M4 steel screws and nuts for most projects. You could even embed them in your plastic pieces using a soldering iron.
It is ironic that we have 10 years old children print remote controls with an Arduino,a led and some batteries.
But yes, this is the equivalent of our experience playing the Amiga.
Visicalc made computers to useful to people who moved lots of money and numbers around.
What can 3-D printers do for people who move lots of money and numbers around.. can they help predict? can they simulate? can they help people compete?
I hope so... the big thing many people miss with 3d printers is that they're excellent for making molds for better materials.
They are simple, inexpensive, versatile hand tools. Files, hammers, chisels, knives, saws, drills, etc. But still, many people have only a meager collection of tools, stashed in a drawer in their kitchen. They don't want to spend them time to mend or create things. They buy replacement parts, they can hire someone to do the work for them, they can buy brand new things, and they can stick with what they know.
3D printers can't win there. They're finicky, they're expensive, their build size is limited, their materials are limited. Barring absolutely monumental improvements in versatility, cost, and usability, 3D printers aren't going to bring anything more than fleeting novelty to the average home.
But what might come next is if industrial designers flip the script and, instead of using 3D printers to make poor prototypes of injection molded parts, they come up with products designed to 3D printers' strengths? Those are few now, but will grow in a feedback loop between manufacturers and designers.
Any one 3D printer is not general purpose as the computer, but all 3D printer types combined are. 3D printers are the first general purpose robots that most people will own, and all of the attachments and use cases of the gantry system make it very versatile.
Using the same extrusion system you can make a liver, a cookie, a sweater, a circuit board, or a house. How is that not general purpose? The gantry system lets us program 3D space however we want it, and that is remarkable.
Well maybe some people would print a gun here or there...
When you say "the technology" do you mean some commercial product or ad-hoc assembled equipment?
Could they be more accesible dropping some "very pro" requirements?
That's false. A lot of prosthetics are being printed on Makerbots.
If you're saying that people are printing implants with Makerbot-type printers, that's new to me - I'd love to read about how they do it and I'd appreciate a link.
When will we get there? Who will be the leaders when we do? We don't know yet. But I dare anyone to claim in good faith that we won't get there!
The biggest innovation I've seen is a British outfit (botObjects) who claim to do in-head mixing of base colours to give proper multicolour printing.
One one side you have college teachers wearing suits sitting at a table with pamphlets advertising their school's fabrication lab. These guys all have commercial 3D printers they bought from a company, and examples of fairly boring objects they printed.
On the other side you have the hackers from the maker spaces. These guys all have 3D printers they have made themselves which favor extreme colors, and bizarre and interesting features that commercial units don't have and can't support. These guys will have mohawks, crazy clothes, piercings, tattoos, and be showing off amazing objects they designed themselves, often to solve actual real life problems.
Currently the market is bifurcated into suits vs artists.
The suits try to sell their printers to other suits and to soccer moms.
The artists are doing the cool stuff.
The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers. It's like when the industry tried to sell early 8 bit computers to women using a marketing message "You can manage your recipes." Sure, but the reality is a card file works even better for that purpose.
The startups are marketing their printer kits to the freaks, rebels, punks, artists and mad scientists. And that's the people that are able to actually use 3D printers right now. Not suits and suburbanites.
Things will change later, but right now this is an early market that appeals a lot to early adopters, who are non conformists by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be early adopters.
It's not about cost either. The author of the article talks about a $299 printer. The custom kit printers tend to cost a lot more than that including all the various costs. Users can save money by buying a commercial fully assembled printer. But that doesn't give you street cred and it's not hot roddable.
I don't agree. A small number of the items are useful, most often replacement parts for things that would either require replacement with much larger parts (custom patches for damaged plastic shell) or which are difficult to replace (item no longer manufactured or firm no longer in business or part so obscure as to hinder repair). I've also seen some novel items that are good prototypes for industrial production.
However, the majority of stuff I see at the 'freak' tables is junk, and samey junk at that. Expansible plastic jewelry, dodecahedral plastic hats (admittedly intended to draw attention to the large print area, but couldn't you find something more interesting?), and a lot of kitchenware, which strikes me as a particularly poor sector; ABS filament is non-toxic but I wouldn't use it where it's likely to encounter heat or alcohol, as would many examples on this page: http://www.pinterest.com/mekitso/3d-printed-kitchen/ Toys are a more obvious application, but most kids are not so into a monochromatic toy, and cheaper printers don't have the resolution to make good multi-part toys. An awful lot of printer offerings I see appear to be motivated by an 'if you build it they will come' approach, but are being offered for sale more on novelty than utility.
The problem is that suits and soccer moms don't want 3D printers.
Suits love 3d printers for industrial design/prototyping, architectural models, anything related to physical products where you might want to go into volume production later. And I do think there's a market for soccer moms: the most commercially interesting offerings I've seen at the lower end of the market in the last year or two is chocolate printing. It turns out that sugar works well enough for extrusion, low resolution is not that big of a deal when you're going to be eating it, and quite a lot of people are into doing really elaborate things with food. OK, such people tend to be artistically inclined too, but since everyone eats that translates into a huge number of people. Martha Stewart is already there: http://www.marthastewart.com/1065207/3d-printing-101 ...although note the bias towards services like Shapeways that can do one-offs in high quality materials, vs home printers. But I bet you'll see a Martha Stewart-branded 3d printer within a few years that's optimized for confectionary use.
Now I'm not into baking or sweets, but I'm willing to bet that confectionery printers become by far the most widespread, while most people will go to a local print shop for quality 3d fabrication, whether that's sintered metal, multicolor paper, or very high resolution multifeed plastic. Makerbot-type printers have about as much future as dot matrix paper printers.
The boring presenters at Maker Faires tend to be offering actual utility, if you can get past the eye candy. If you doubt this, go to a large hardware store; they have quantitites of boring-looking things with very high utility.
And sugar isn't being used for extrusion, unless you're referring to the paste extruders which are basically icing bags.
Now with some automation we can make the same thing for $18, and we can wholesale it for $59. That is after 10 years and thousands of units, so we learned a little on the way.
I think this article is a little simplistic about manufacturing costs, but the point is true - raise the price. Sounds like what patio11 says about SaaS products.
But then there is for example the Peachy Printer that is trying to be cheaper ($100) by innovating and reducing the components: no motors, no big rigid frame, no external power besides what comes from the computer. Sure it will not be the most accurate printer and it's still in development, but it looks feasible and shows that with innovation you can reduce the costs.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-pr...
Honestly, after backing Peachy and researching SLA printers considerably, I'm more intrigued by SeeMeCNC's DropLit when looking at the future of 3D consumer printers.
One of their milestone goals is to use the Peachy Printer to build a usable sixteen-foot single-piece canoe, and actually test it out on a lake. If they can manage that, even if they have to install some specialized optics to make it work, it will be extremely impressive, and demonstrate capabilities that far exceed those of more expensive 3D printers.
I think the biggest weakness of the Peachy Printer is the specialized consumables it requires. The resin solution it uses as a build material is going to be considerably more expensive, harder to obtain, and more difficult to store in volume than the spools of cheap ABS or PLA used by more conventional 3D printers.
I think you can have an injection mold made for a lot less in China. Maybe 5-10K? Anyone have accurate numbers?
It seems that the only way you can manufacture such things very cheaply in China is living there.
If you are injecting a zillion parts and .1 cent matters, then China is great. If you don't have the volume to amortize all the pieces, screwups, and lost time, then China is a bust.
However, one of the things that people miss here is that nobody here is actually talking a real volume (100K+ parts). Even if you can get the mold cheap, any competent injection molder is going to charge you an amount for NRE setup time that is going to make injecting 1,000 parts not particularly price competitive.
50K is actually very much on the low end for mold making, of course everything depends on size, expected # of products, cycle speed. An sizeable edm produced mold of tungsten with copper laminate for heat management is going to be a lot more expensive than a small mold for a protoype run where speed and number of products are not critical.
But they're talking about making perhaps only a few thousand parts. The number I saw was 2400 or so. For only 2400 parts (per YEAR!) you could make aluminum molds which are much, much cheaper. 2400 parts a year is 50 per week or one every three hours. Even if your cycle time was 10 minutes (which is an eternity even for old shoddy equipment) you can still make all the parts in 400 hours which is 2.5 weeks straight or 10 weeks of 9-5 production.
There is a company in the US which will make simple molds for much less than $50k. For that you could get 5-10 molds and all the parts and possibly have money to spare. http://www.protolabs.com/protomold
If you're talking about the kinds of molds necessary to do something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHwTHarf8Ck then yes I agree $50k is a total joke. But for the batch of parts necessary to build a semi-successful production run for a 3d printer, $50k might be overkill.
That said, when he said $50k in molds, I pictures $50k in ProtoMold molds, not $50k in steel molds. I imagine steel molds would be more on the order of $250k.
This... is all an example of how 3D printing can change the game. But it, too, will have to become an art form first.
However, getting a price this good wasn't easy; my team is passionate about low-cost sourcing, we speak fluent Mandarin, and our parts are small compared to some of the large parts in a 3D printer.
We even had to take things one step further and pretend our company was based in China. Due to the principal of Guanxi (Chinese business ethics where you treat family and friends very well but it's OK to cheat foreigners), Chinese companies will often charge 5x the domestic price if they think they're selling to a foreign buyer.
I'm planning to see "Print the Legend" later this week, so this was very interesting. I see the Variety review of the film says "Because Lopez and Tweel are tracking the rise but not the fall, “Print the Legend” doesn’t have the falling-apart-before-your-eyes immediacy of “Startup.com” - but is seems pretty clear from this article that there will be a lot of falling apart happening.
Always crunch the numbers and do a feasibility report before you decide to crowdfund it.
This is why 90% of Startups fail as well, they focus on making the product but they fail to plan ahead and make sure that the costs aren't higher than the investment money and figure in salaries, taxes, fees, etc.
Printrbot has had a good $300 FDM solution for a long time; to get significantly better, you really need SLS or Resin lithography solutions. And even there, the competition is hearing up as old patents expire.
You don't need to make molds, printrbot started without those, and you don't need four people for starting.
Another whining article: http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/can-we-get-wrench-crow...
A gem from it:"A suicidal price war has ensued, but unlike most price wars, this one does not necessarily benefit the consumer."
Of course it benefits the consumer, but does not for those selling cheap, like in any price war.
Companies already established have an advantage over new comers like in anything else. If you get late to the party, the party is gone.
I am engineer and entrepreneur, and I have designed my own 3D aluminum-steel printer from scratch in my spare time!! in less than a year. Most of the hard work is already done, a Prusa i3 structure is already designed and open. So are the extruder, hot ends, electronics.
If you create a new company, you need to provide value. Something unique that does not exist.
If you can't, just crying on Internet is useless. You are not entitled to have a business.
I know a couple people that work at MakerBot. They're not dumb. The reason the printer keeps getting more expensive over time is because that's what it takes to make a nice one.